It just dawned on me. I want Google to do an online calendaring system. Yeah, it won’t solve 95% of my scheduling problems because it won’t have access to behind-the-firewall data and it won’t do the collaboration part of scheduling, but at the least it’ll have a more usable UI than what I’m working with now, and it’ll have some sort of export to standard formats like iCal that will let me fool myself into thinking that the end is near…
Related: how come google search integrates desktop searches but not gmail searches? That seems weird.
by Stephen
15 Feb 2005 at 16:24
Why Google and not, say, Yahoo!? (We’re running the family calendars Sun ONE Calendar Server, which has a Web front end and a calendaring API, but not iCal support.)
by David Ascher
15 Feb 2005 at 16:44
Simply because I can’t stand Yahoo!’s aesthetic, while I like Google’s.
(i noticed that blueslugs is now a WP site? =)
by Stephen
15 Feb 2005 at 21:42
Since January 7th. I’ll go read about Hula but I find that vCal/iCal-based calendaring a depressing reimplementation of earlier networked calendaring systems. Where’s probability-based spontaneous scheduling? Where’s tentative group reservation handling (automatic cancellation management)?
by David Ascher
16 Feb 2005 at 15:27
See http://www.hula-project.org/index.php/Calendar_Ideas
They are trying to go beyond the basics, with natural language parsing of “tomorrow at 3″ and the like.
Lack of interop effectively kills any interest of mine in any of the previous systems I’ve been exposed to. I have no opinion re: iCal/vCal except that it’s better than what Notes or Exchange sends because interop is at least possible.